Street Names in England

I'm sure that there are ALOT of great names but two that we saw were Oldbutt Road and Crotch Close. Unfortunately we were only able to get a picture of one.

Funny stories

Looking back through the blog I realized that I forgot two funny stories involving drinking (and they didn't include me).

I flying back from Amman, Jordan to London-Heathrow and was sitting next to a Scottish guy returning home after 6 months of working in Jeddah. We landed in Beirut, Lebanon to pick up some more passengers. We had to wait on the tarmac for 2-3 hours because of very high winds in England. Well...the Scottish guy found out that they had IrnBru (Scottish soft drink) on the plane and, it being BA, the alcohol was free. After an uncountable amount of vodka & IrnBru's while listening to his headphones he started singing (loudly) and crying....oh, I almost forgot...and arguing with the flightcrew because he didn't believe that he had drank all the IrnBru. I'll always remember that flight as "The One with the Drunk Scotsman."

The second story deals with the Pogues' lead singer, Shane MacGowan. At the Birmingham (UK) Pogues concert this past December, Shane was beyond drunk. He would sing fine during the song but, during an instrumental break or a song by one of the other band members, he would leave the stage (with his bottle) and stumble off. After it was done he would stumble back on stage. He would swing his microphone by the cord and smacked it off of the ground and the mike stand. A few times we would drop the F-bomb to the crowd. It was still great to hear the Pogues play again. We had seen them once in Washington DC back in 1995 or so.

England Rugby

It's funny...I never really found myself cheering for the English soccer team in competitions because everyone in England always thought that the team was unbeatable....yet they always underperformed.

In the leadup to the Rugby World Cup (the final is tomorrow) the English team was getting beat regularly by the other top teams to the extent that nobody in England expected much. And what happened? Well...New Zealand, the runaway favorite, was beaten by France. England upset Australia in the quarters, the host French in the semis and now face South Africa in the finals. I'm cheering for England for a change.

Wildlife on Osburn Road

The deer are still all around the woods. I have had to put up a fence around the strawberries and also around the vegetables (broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower,lettuce). I wasn't running a buffet for the deer. We have gotten one fully ripened strawberry already and a a bunch more are growing!

The squirrels are running around and birds are returning since I hung up a bird feeder.

Leo has started hunting more but usually goes outside in the daytime rather than at night. He brought us a present the other morning.

When I was putting up the fence I heard a lot of noise in the woods that I had to track down. It was a feisty box turtle that wouldn't hide in its shell.



While gardening we also found a salamander.